Sunday, October 27, 2013

Saad Shafqat’s Breath of Death is quite the ‘thriller
from Pakistan’ it’s positioned as. It’s also a socio-political commentary on
Pakistan and an examination of the often fraught, rather complicated
relationship between Pakistan and the US.

And it is this
relationship between the US, Pakistan and the larger Islamic world that
provides the context for the book’s relatively straightforward plot. Dr Asad
Mirza, a talented, youngish neurologist and Nadia Khan, an eager medical
student, encounter a mysterious neurological illness in the wards of a Karachi
teaching hospital. While attempting to solve the puzzle of this strange
infection, the two walk right into the middle of a bio-terrorism plot against
the US.

Both Karachi and
the intricacies of the human brain are familiar territory to Shafqat, a
neurologist who lives in the city. And this knowledge shows. He writes with
authority and confidence about things that happen in the hospital and in the
city.

The writing,
though, is often jerky, with abrupt transitions. Yet, it’s also very
descriptive and evocative, painting portraits of people and places. Shafqat has
an eye for detail, and the images he builds are so powerful that I could almost
see, touch and smell them.

Characterisation
is one of Shafqat’s strengths and almost all the characters seem very real.
Even the ‘bad guys’ like Hamza Kadri, the scientist who designs the bio-weapon
and Malik Feysal, the zealous operative of the terrorist ‘Network’, are
portrayed as multi-layered beings. Sample this description of the fussy,
irascible, obsessive-compulsive Hamza Kadri: “Noticing a speck of grit on the
machine’s shiny Perkin Elmer monogram plate, he flicked it off with a finger.
Then he fidgeted with his trousers, adjusting them over his hips again. He stuffed
in his shirt. Then, noticing a fold that wasn’t quite right, he pulled it out
and stuffed it in again.”

Shafqat, also
deftly captures the love-hate relationship that many people in Pakistan — and
South Asia perhaps — seem to have with the US. An equation that’s equal parts
fascination and frustration. Even Asad Mirza, the book’s principal protagonist,
who’s studied and worked in the US, is not completely free of this sentiment.
As Shafqat writes early on in the book: “Deep down, all of them, even Asad,
felt aggrieved by America’s overreach around the world although not everyone
was willing to acknowledge it so openly.”

Yet, Asad’s
disquiet with certain aspects of US policy does not prevent him from doing the
right thing. Despite several challenges, he is able to alert the US authorities
about the bio-terror plot and all ends well.

My one big
grouse with Breath of Death is with
the plot’s pace. Like many of the soap operas on television, it chugs along
very sedately and then, before you know it, it’s all over. The ending is so
hurried that it seems shoehorned into the plot.

In fact, the
last few chapters of the book didn’t quite work for me; at least not in the way
the early chapters did. For one, I found the whole sub-plot built around
Nadia’s trip to the US to intern at a lab in Boston almost contrived. This
thread doesn’t quite add to the story, expect, perhaps, to bolster the thesis
about Pakistani disquiet with “America’s overreach around the world”.

Also puzzling is
a lack of attention to detail that creeps in towards the end of the book. A
telling example is how Nadia carries a biological sample in her backpack when
she travels to the US. She’s got no clearance from the US authorities to do
this and seems surprised when US customs confiscates the specimen. It is hard
to imagine how Asad and Nadia’s hosts in the US, both prominent medical
researchers, thought she could simply enter the country with a biological
specimen in a flask of formalin.

I also do wish
that Shafqat had given a bit more detail about how the virus designed by Kadri
worked. I know the plot hinges on deploying an aerosol-based delivery system.
But what is not clear is just how the virus was tested in Karachi. For
instance, how is it that the test subjects alone were infected by the virus,
while the people around them were untouched by the ‘breath of death’.

Despite these
bumps, I quite enjoyed Breath of Death.
It is an interesting and intriguing tale told rather well.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

The pillar was
not much to look at; a grey column of stone, with a plaque at its base. It
stood on a sandy, scrub-filled lot, flanked by a water tank and a crumbling
building sprouting a banyan tree. Several hundred metres away, on the other
side of a sandy knoll, was the Arabian Sea.

Appearances,
though, can be deceptive. Unassuming it certainly is, but the pillar marks a
very important event in the history of the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore and,
indeed, the Dutch empire — the Battle of Colachal.

For Marthanda
Varma, arguably Travancore’s greatest ruler, the victory at Colachal was one
large step towards consolidating his rule over southern Kerala. For the Dutch,
writes historian A. Sreedhara Menon in A
Survey of Kerala History, “… the battle of Colachel shattered for all time
to come their dream of the conquest of Kerala.”

Ruins of the chapel in which De Lannoy is buried

The canny
statesman that he was, Marthanda Varma was able to charm De Lannoy and some of
his Dutch aides into joining Travancore’s army. De Lannoy spent the next 36
years of his life serving Travancore — training local soldiers in European
military tactics and shaping the kingdom’s military strategies.

It seems he
never returned to the Netherlands and when he died in 1777, was buried within
Udayagiri fort not too far from Colachal. The story of De Lannoy’s Travancore
years though, is a tale for another day.

Monday, August 5, 2013

This month’s
issue of National Geographic Traveller India looks at urban renewal in the
country. At how cities across India are changing and how some neighbourhoods in
some of these cities are attempting to repurpose themselves. Or as the introductory
note puts it, in this issue “we look at localities that are seeking new futures
without destroying their pasts.” It’s an interesting mix of stories by writers
from across India and it’s great to have two pieces of mine in this section. For
more, head here.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Entire authorial
careers (and reputations) have been built on the Cold War. But surprisingly,
not many writers have tapped into the rich vein that is the often fraught
relationship between India and Pakistan.

Over the past several months though, there have been half-a-dozen or so
books, written mostly by Indians, that have focused on South Asia and the
India-Pakistan equation. Of these, Shatrujeet Nath’s The Karachi Deception has
an intriguing plot, with a nice, punchy twist at the very end. The book itself
is, however, a frustratingly uneven read. More in this piece I did for last
month’s The Hindu Literary Review.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

My last visit to
Padmanabhapuram Palace was several months ago, while writing this story for
National Geographic Traveller India. Wandering through the complex, these very
unique signboards caught my eye.

They’re quaint,
but also revealing of the extreme casualness with which we in India approach
our cultural heritage. We talk about our ‘heritage’ ad-infinitum and throw a
fit if we even suspect that someone has
‘insulted’ it, but beyond that our commitment to our heritage falters.

It was sad to
see these ad-hoc signboards in one of the most important cultural sites in this
part of the country. How hard is it to make the investments needed to ensure
that the palace complex has the infrastructure it deserves, including proper,
meaningful and well-maintained signboards?

Perhaps new signage
has been put up in the palace since my last visit, but the signboards with a
difference popped up in my mind when I saw this report about efforts to get
Padmanabhapuram onto UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites list.

If Padmanabhapuram
does make it to the list, there will be much celebration. But what will that
recognition mean on the ground? And, more important, will we celebrate and
cherish Padmanabhapuram even it doesn’t make it to any heritage list?

Sunday, June 2, 2013

One afternoon soon after I turned 21, I found a stack of black and
white photographs on the desk in my neighbour’s study. Noticing my very obvious
interest in the pictures, my neighbour gave me the whole bunch. Riffling
through, I found an image that made my heart race — an alluring, mysterious
black pool, its surface alive with oddly-shaped patterns of light. I was
smitten.

Later, Sushil Pillai, my neighbour and a retired army officer with a
diverse portfolio of interests, explained that the mysterious black pool was
actually the glistening black floor of the ‘hall of the princesses’ in the
royal ladies’ wing of the Padmanabhapuram palace. And the patterns that so
enthralled me were created by sunlight falling through the carved wooden
screens that run along one wall of the room. This matter-of-fact explanation,
however, did nothing to douse my interest in Padmanabhapuram, which from around
1550 to 1790 was the capital of the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore.

And so, I set out to dig up as much as I could about the palace,
which when I look back, wasn’t very much. Using the ‘Automobile Association Map
of South India’ I figured out that it was located about 55 kilometres south of
Thiruvananthapuram in a village called Kalkulam in Tamil Nadu’s Kanyakumari
district, close to the town of Thuckalay. Another discovery was that though
geographically in Tamil Nadu, Padmanabhapuram palace is an archaeological
museum maintained jointly by the governments of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, but run
by Kerala’s archaeology department.

Historians, as they often are, are divided about when the palace was
built. Some say 1335,others 1550. Either way, by the middle of the 14th
century a mud fort and a palace of some sort existed in Kalkulam. The palace,
called Darpakulangara, was probably little more than a large house built in the
traditional Kerala nalukettu style,
with four wings around a central courtyard.

It was only in the 18th century that substantial changes
took place. Marthanda Varma, one of Travancore’s greatest rulers, rebuilt the
Darpakulangara palace and the fort that guarded it. In 1744, he renamed the
fort and the palace Padmanabhapuram in honour of Sri Padmanabhaswamy, the
tutelary deity of Travancore’s royal family.

Fascinated as I was by the palace and its story, I actually got
around to visiting Padmanabhapuram only a few years later. But that first visit
and the several that followed over the years were, strangely, whistle-stop
affairs which I remember little of.

Then almost a decade later, I stumbled upon a story in my wife’s
family: R. Vasudeva Poduval, my wife’s great-grandfather, who was director of
the Travancore State Archaeology Department was supposed to have been involved
with efforts made in the late 1930s to restore the Padmanabhapuram palace. A
stone plaque in the palace’s forecourt apparently recorded his association with
the restoration.

That’s when I knew I really had to return to Padmanabhapuram — to
spend some quality time exploring the palace and to hunt for the plaque. So
early one weekday morning last December, I set off on the two-hour drive south
from Thiruvananthapuram.

As my car makes its way through Kalkulam’s narrow streets, there is
little to show that the palace is around the corner except for some remnants of
the fort’s walls. A turn or two later I am at the palace gate.

I enter the palace’s forecourt. And what immediately catches my eye
are the Veli Hills, as the Western Ghats are called here, that loom over and
guard the palace’s eastern flank.

I spot a few plaques cemented into the walls of the antiquities
museum nearby, but none of them say anything about Vasudeva Poduval. It’s still
pretty early in the day, there’s no one in the palace’s administrative offices.
So I decide to defer my quest for the plaque. Instead, I buy a ticket, stow my
shoes in a rack and head off barefoot to rediscover Padmanabhapuram palace.

One of two cavernous oottupuras

or dining halls in the palace.

Like every visitor, I climb several steps and enter the palace
through the poomukham or entrance
hall with its carved pillars and wooden ceiling. This is where the king met
and, perhaps, entertained guests. A granite cot and an ornate throne-like
chair, adorn the poomukham, but it is
upwards that my eyes go. For the poomukham’s
real treasure are the lotuses carved into its ceiling — 90 of them, each carved
in a different design establishing the craftsman’s mastery over wood.

From the poomukham I
scramble up a narrow staircase, through a trapdoor, to the mantrasala or council chamber. Easily one of my favourite rooms in
the palace, this airy hall with its red- and ochre–stained mica windows was
where the king met his ministers and special visitors. A broad wooden seat with
a receptacle beneath it runs along one side of the room and wooden louvers set
in the seat let air in, helping to keep it cool. On hot summer days, this
receptacle was filled with aromatic herbs and sandalwood sprinkled with water,
filling the chamber with a
fragrant breeze.

Next door is the oottupura or dining hall. The two
cavernous halls, one on the first floor and another on the ground floor, were
designed to feed 2,000 people at a time. As I walk through, I can almost see
rows of hungry diners feasting on mounds of steaming rice, vegetables and
curry, all washed down with buttermilk and water drawn from one of several
large stone troughs positioned across the halls.

Across from the oottupura
is the thaikottaram or mother palace,
the oldest part of the palace. At its south-western end is a pillar that has
been carved from a single jackfruit tree. A deep coffee brown, it is believed
to be the first pillar to have been erected when the palace was being
constructed.

Like many buildings of the time, Padmanabhapuram was built mostly of
local material — chiefly wood, laterite bricks and stone. Its gleaming black
floors I first fell in love with, are built on a base of brick or laterite
stone, plastered with a mixture of lime, egg white, tender coconut water, burnt
coconut shells, sand and the juices of several herbs.

What I find striking — and appealing — about the Padmanabhapuram
palace is that it almost never overpowers. There seems little desire to
dominate or demand attention. Instead it exudes a quiet confidence, possibly
born from the subordination of the kingdom to a higher, divine force — Sri
Padmanabhaswamy.

Once
these stone troughs in the oottupura held

water and buttermilk. A tradition
that seems to

continue, in part at least, today!

If there is one part of Padmanabhapuram that proclaims ‘palace’, it
probably is the four-storey upparika malika, which was the king’s turf. From his bedroom on the first floor, the
king could look to the courtyard below and watch men being selected for
Travancore’s army. In the courtyard, mounted on a pillar, is a round stone that
supposedly weighs 38 kilograms. Young men aspiring to join the army had to be
able to raise the stone one hundred times to even be considered for selection.

Elegant austerity is the
leitmotif of the king’s bedroom that is dominated by a four-poster cot supposed
to be made of 67 different medicinal woods. A flight of stairs leads up through
a trapdoor to the second floor bedroom, which the king used when he was fasting
or performing other austerities. Further up, on the third floor, is the prayer
room, its walls decorated with murals and a cot for Sri Padmanabhaswamy. It is believed that the Lord still uses the room,
and lamps are lit and prayers offered in the room every day. Entry to the upper
two floors though is now restricted.

From the first floor of the upparika malika, a corridor leads off to the vepumootu
kottaram or the palace of the neem roots where the royal women lived. Airy
and spacious, with wooden swings and large Belgian mirrors, this ‘hall of the
princesses’ has floors that still glint like a pool of black water.

By this time, I’m feeling very hot
and thirsty with all the walking and climbing. I’ve forgotten to bring a bottle
of water and ask one of the palace’s staff if there’s any way I can quickly
slip out to get a drink. However, she says I need to finish the tour if I want
to leave. So I press on and quickly head to the navarathri mandapam.

Arguably the most beautiful part
of the palace, the pillared navarathri mandapam came alive with dance
and music during the festival of the nine nights or navarathri. And
though the glistening floor of the mandapam or hall has been scarred by
the ravages of time and human effort, it still retains some of its original
allure.

I’m tempted to linger, but lose
the battle to thirst and head out. Once I’ve had a couple of tender coconuts I
head back to the administrative offices and meet R. Jayashree, the museum
assistant. I explain my mission — the hunt for the plaque — and she’s as
helpful as can be. She takes me into an adjacent office where there’s a plaque
hidden behind a stack of boards; but it has no mention of Vasudeva Poduval.
Sensing my disappointment, Jayashree reassures me that she has seen his name in
the palace’s files and departmental correspondence. My quest for the plaque
ends right there, but I decide to stay a while longer, anyway.

Back out in the forecourt, I
watch the crowds of visitors, the symphony of the palace’s roofs and the
ever-present Veli hills in the near distance. It strikes me that the master
builders who designed and built the Padmanabhapuram palace have achieved a deft
balance between material, space and light to create a very sophisticated yet
self-effacing building.

As Sushil Pillai tells me later,
Padmanabhapuram palace represents a very unique Kerala sensibility; an innate
sense of proportion and elegance and the subordination of the individual
architect. What, I ask, is it about Padmanabhapuram that draws him. He pauses
for a second or two and says: “It’s a bit like falling in love.” I can’t but
agree.